Updating UK Xoom Wifi MZ604 from android 3.0.1 to 3.2

This shows how to upgrade your Xoom Wifi (MZ604) from Android/Honeycomb 3.0.1 to 3.2

As all the UK (as well as other non-US) Motorola Xoom owners are aware, their Xooms are stuck on Android 3.01 whereas the US version is already rolling onto 3.2. The European customers were promised version 3.1 a few weeks ago, but there is no news of anyone actually getting that update yet.

So … if you have a UK Xoom Wifi, here’s how you can get 3.2 installed on it. It’s not completely risk-free, and not entirely simple either, but it’s certainly less frustrating than dealing with Motorola Support when it comes to finding out information on updates.

I guess right now your About tablet screen looks like this …

… and that’s what we’re about to change!

The Process

The process you’ll follow is:

Flash the U.S stock 3.0.1 image

Auto-update to 3.1 (and then to 3.2)

Flash the ClockworkMod Recovery image

Flash the Rooted 3.2 image.

UPDATE: As a couple of comments have pointed out, the 3.2 update is now available OTA via the Auto Update. It is a two stage process, it will first update to 3.1 and reboot, after which, if you check for updates again it will find 3.2. So, follow steps 3 and 4 only if you want a rooted version of 3.2. Cheers commenters for pointing this out.

NOTE:By following these steps you’ll be voiding the warranty on your Xoom, and there is a chance you could brick your device. I’ve only tried it on the UK Wifi Xoom i.e. the MZ604. Also, this will erase all your data from the Xoom, so back things up!

These are quite detailed instructions so the process seems quite long, but it should take less than an hour to complete for most people. If you’ve done firmware updates before, it should really take around 20 minutes to fully root, or less than that to get the stock Android 3.2.

The Tools

To carry out the update, you’ll need the Micro USB cable supplied with the Xoom (or another good quality i.e. short cable). Don’t connect the USB cable to a Hub, connect it directly to the PC.

If you want the rooted version of 3.2, you will also need a Micro SD card and a Micro SD reader for your PC.

On your PC you’ll need:

Latest Java SDK

Latest Android SDK

Motorola USB Drivers

The US Xoom firmware – Build HWI69 for US Retail 122 MB N/A MZ604, which you can get from the Motorola Dev Site. It requires free registration

Install the first 3, and extract the last into c:\xoom\. It should create the MZ604_HWI69 subdirectory in there.

Add the path to the android-sdk\tools and android-sdk\platform-tools to your path environment variable, so you can run these commands from everywhere. If you don’t want to add it to your system environment variable, you can open a Command Prompt and add the paths environment variable for just that prompt.

Open a command prompt, and make sure the adb and fastboot commands work. Run c:, then cd \xoom\MZ604_HWI69. Run dir and make sure it shows the following files: boot.img, recovery.img, system.img, and userdata.img.

Thanks a million for this guide- mine initially had issues with the fastboot flash boot boot.img but seems to have gone through nonetheless – I also got an OTA upgrade in 2 steps straight to 3.2 (first to 3.1 then to 3.2)

@DK1942 – Yeah. That’s quite annoying if you want to use the SD for normal work. But I guess it is at least a step up from having a completely non-functional SD slot. Hopefully a 3.2.1 patch will be released soon.

@Richard – did you have to connect to the internet through a U.S Proxy?

Just tested the ABD Devices command, all seems well. However, how do I test whether fastboot will work? I’ve tried running the “fastboot devices” command in the android-sdk\platform-tools directory but I get the “‘fastboot’ isn’t a recognized command” error come up. Do I need to do this in a specific directory, or is something wrong?

Hi Jamie, fastboot is in your ‘android-sdk\tools’ folder. It’s not in the same folder as adb (i.e. ‘android-sdk\platform-tools’). You should have both paths in your ‘path’ environment variable as mentioned in page 1.

I’ve put both paths in the environment variable and have double checked to make sure they are still there. I have changed the directory and run the fastboot devices command to find this error. Any ideas?